An excellent telling of a horrible political massacre. This white supremacist newspapers tells a white conservative tale that is a mind-bending lie, leaving much out, if not some of the most important. The Senator and Governor were Democrats. Why don’t we list that before or after their names as is common today? For example Democrat Senator Eustis said..” or “Governor McElenry (D, LA) did not act to stop the violence, instead, he supplied th Gatlin gun, a military weapon belonging to the government, to terrorize the black forced laborers.” These changes language and absenting of factual evidence on a continual basis allows for no historical culpability. While we watch the news today we are told constantly of this basic fact of party affiliation, but when we read history it is absent, and yet little is said about this missing factual evidence. Once we learn it over and over, in 1887, in 1910, what we begin to get is a picture of white Democratic voters going to the polls for decades, the most vile white supremacists, who were klan members, and it begins to mess with our minds. Of course, the accountability grows even wider, to a national picture of white racial violence nationally, or at the very least the acceptance of it.
There is no way Northern Democrats could not caucus with these Southern Democrats from 1828 to 1960 without any awareness of who they were. These Southern Democrats, along with their northern Democrat allies, wrote and passed the anti-black Agricultural Act and anti-black domestic worker act that prevent the 79 percent of all blacks in America for forming unions in 1935. The real name was the Wagner Act, that established the NLRA, but forbid those categories of workers like sugar cane workers from forming union. Today, Northern White Democrats keep spreading the false idea the when FDR signed them he was somehow helping black Americans instead of racistly preventing your grandfather from unionizing. Today that Southern Racist wing is in the Republican Party, after quitting in June 1964. Those democrats filibustered the CRA until blue in the face. When they lost, they quit the party.
My point is simple. When you live under this white controlled narrative, you don’t get the full picture of repression blacks lived under. What is absent—party affiliation, the use of the most deadly United States Military Weapon, the Gatlin Gun, are notoriously absent. Clearly, the governor allowed this monstrosity of a weapon to be used to repress the riot. And clearly the idea of being paid in “scripts” and not US currency means they are forced laborers, not free America laborers. “Some were not paid at all” is another indication of “slavery or involuntary servitude” as is written in the 13th amendment.
The article is very significant and well written. I only point out what is consistent in all the sources I’ve read in modern times, and the different language that appeared in white supremacists newspapers, black newspapers from that time period, and white liberal newspapers. And how they varied, and how those differences reveal a vast difference in who is telling the tale of American history and how. Thanks much.
